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Post by celawson on Aug 25, 2017 12:16:49 GMT -5
That's attacking me, not my opinion. That's attacking me, not my opinion. I'm not unintelligent. I was able to gain entrance into a top ten U.S. med school. I was raised in a conservative household. So I think it's not unreasonable to believe that I can read the news or current events and formulate some ideas that...SURPRISE...are similar to National Review or a conservative pundit's without having yet read any piece by them that echoes my sentiments. As a matter of fact, that happens pretty regularly. I wish I could come up with all of my opinions spontaneously, without ever being exposed to or gleaning insights from others' expert opinions, but unfortunately I cannot. If you can, more power to you. Of your request for research/scholarship regarding the imbalance of faculty in universities, there is a TON about the actual numbers. Rations of D vs R range from a few:1 to over 30:1 (and even up to 60:1 at Brown) depending on the school and department. econjwatch.org/file_download/944/LangbertQuainKleinSept2016.pdf?mimetype=pdfThere are more, but I'm confident you can find them yourself. Not so much is out there about the systemic hiring practices, though there's certainly a lot of anecdotal stuff, as you hinted at. Here's a good opinion piece that lays out some concerns: www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0320-shields-dunn-conservative-affirmative-action-20160320-story.htmlOf course, this problem may be conservatives who self-select out of these areas before they become professors. And here in this line of thinking, we are getting close to our poor Google-fired Damore who tried to speculate on the possible deeper root of the gender difference in tech jobs -- the root of the problem here could go back further than when one applies to a professorial position. However, if it's discrimination further back - like in undergraduate studies where students don't feel comfortable expressing conservative views or see themselves as discriminated against because of their views, then they might be less likely to pursue that line of academia. Or there could be discrimination at the stage of graduate school application. This is speculation, of course, but not out of the realm of real possibility. In any event, here are two scholarly articles that examine this in more detail: yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdfwww.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=731 - this one goes in depth into speculation about issues like group think that could be at least partially to blame here. Common sense tells me it is. The bottom line for me is that yes, I do think this imbalance in our universities' political ideology is dangerous. I think that, because the group in the majority likes to stifle the speech of the opposition. And the imbalance has been increasing over the last several years - I recently read an article with nice graphs illustrating this, but I can't find it now sorry. And when our most elite schools turn out extraordinary people like Zuckerberg and Pichai who make or rise to the top of monster tech companies and think nothing of the incongruity of firing an employee for his unique perspective while at the same time saying Google employees should feel safe to express differing viewpoints, then I'm of course concerned. Do you honestly think that if Pichai had been educated with the values of Hillsdale college I showed you above, that he would have so quickly fired Damore? I honestly don't think he would have. And I absolutely think that Google has done more damage to our privacy, and has demonstrated more concerning big-brother type actions like censorship (altered search engine results, etc) in a vastly far-reaching scope, than poor blowhard Donald Trump could ever in his life or presidency do.
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Post by celawson on Aug 24, 2017 19:06:09 GMT -5
I really HATE it when you, Amadan, continue to insult me with the "cut and paste" stuff. Those comments are stupid and ad hominem and petty and immature. But whatever. Somone was fired at Google for neither being a dick nor being "controversial". He bent over backwards to try not to be either. Yet he was fired. THAT should concern everyone. And with the number of indoctrinated kids being churned out of our universities each year, you REALLY think left-leaning academia is not an issue? That's a funny one. The fact that liberal institutions vastly outnumber conservative ones, which you so conveniently wrote down up above, IS an issue! Right leaning liberal arts professors have trouble getting hired and being retained or tenured. It's a self-perpetuating phenomenon. And it certainly CAN bring about a Reichstag in terms of shutting down opposing speech/censorship etc. Where do you think these CEOs have been educated? Jack Dorsey went to NYU. Zuckerberg went to Harvard. Pichai went to Stanford and Wharton. Sheesh. And once more, a bit further down, you helped my point about Trump when you said this: That's right -- HE CAN'T DO IT! Yet Google and Twitter and the like can do anything they please with regards to this sort of censorship, because they're "private companies". So no, I'm not shaking in my boots about Trump like you seem to be. We have checks and balances. But I definitely am concerned with the likes of Google. At this point, there don't seem to be any checks, and there's definitely not balance. Here's an example of a conservative college's view on freedom of speech on campus: hillsdalecollegian.com/2016/04/use-free-speech-to-challenge-and-understand-your-beliefs/THAT'S what a college should be like.
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Post by celawson on Aug 24, 2017 18:45:22 GMT -5
You cannot breed Down Syndrome out of the population, because it's not a heritable defect. It's a random event. So if you want to eradicate it, you have to find a cure. If you don't want it in the population, and you don't have a cure, you must keep killing every unborn child with the defect. I am absolutely not against curing Down Syndrome. I'm also not saying Iceland is a terrible place because women choose to abort an unborn child with Down Syndrome. I'm saying it seems that if a country has a 100%, or approaching 100%, kill rate for fetuses with Down Syndrome, then there is apparently pressure on pregnant women to 1) have the testing done 2) kill their fetus if the test is positive
It is the pressure that is evil.
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Post by celawson on Aug 24, 2017 17:17:26 GMT -5
I agree it's apples and oranges. That's why I was being facetious with regards to Trump putting a journalist in jail. The concept is concerning, but it's never going to happen! He's a blowhard. And we have checks and balances. Except, apparently, in the case of these big, left-leaning tech companies.
And I do think this issue of social justice warrior clamping down on free speech IS a problem way more on the left than the right. It's been happening for years on university campuses - microagressions? Guest conservative speakers? What about the recent example of American Airlines investigating two of their employees because Leah Dunham Tweeted a complaint that she overhead the two employees having a PRIVATE conversation about transgender people which upset Ms. Dunham. Seriously? They were investigated about a private conversation??? I'm sorry, but the slippery slope is getting waaayyyy too slippery.
I would love to see concrete examples in recent days of right wing institutionalized (school, university, company) censoring or clamping down on free speech. I'm not aware of anything near the numbers or significance of the examples I and especially Rob have just given.
Yes. They already are.
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Post by celawson on Aug 24, 2017 11:18:58 GMT -5
Cassandra, the administration is not "right-wing". Trump is not "right-wing". Trump's blowhard statements are not anywhere near as damaging or concerning as a giant tech company's (Google's) actions which reach into the vast majority of our households, privacy, behaviors, etc. And Trump has raised important issues about the bias in mainstream news, which for the public, is actually a good thing to help us be more aware and more wary of what we're reading. I don't agree with Trump a lot of the time, and I am disappointed at some of the things he's done, but the MSM HAS been unfairly biased against him in many instances, and in many instances has exaggerated or misrepresented the facts in order to make him look bad. When you find a journalist whom Trump has jailed for faithfully reporting the news or even an opinion piece, please let me know and I will join you in your concern and outrage.
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Post by celawson on Aug 24, 2017 10:37:09 GMT -5
To me, this type of great power wielded by the big tech companies is something that really needs to be examined. Yes, the companies are private, but they control WAY too much of our communication to just write those sorts of censorship behaviors off as okay. Conservatives at places like National Review have been concerned about this sort of thing for some time, because the politics of these giants leans way left and it has been conservatives feeling the bias. For example, Dennis Prager has been talking for a while about the YouTube bias against Prager U's videos: www.nationalreview.com/article/441400/google-youtubes-prageru-censorship-prager-universitys-conservative-videos-censoredAnd National Review recently had an article, which I can't find now, in which the author's Tweets have been blocked from some sort of promotional process Twitter has within its system - sorry I can't remember the details - but the Tweets were not allowed to be promoted due to phrases such as "illegal alien". These Tweets, which the author put in the article, were research-based facts about illegal immigrants that were not inflammatory or defaming in any way, but apparently simply using the word "illegal" was enough to trigger Twitter's internal bias. What worries me is that the left really does not mind censorship these days, if the speech doesn't go along with their partisan viewpoint. And it seems they are okay with these tech giants because the owners and CEOs wear tee shirts and promote progressive causes. But this is a VERY dangerous place in unchartered territory, and we need to do a lot of soul searching and analysis to figure out the correct path forward. I think we ALL should be extremely wary of Google and the like, and the abuses it takes with its search engine and our privacy. This is not good nor right nor American, and we're just ignorant sitting ducks who are too reliant on their services and too ignorant to know how to avoid them. Speaking of sitting ducks, I just recently heard about search engines that do not track you such as duckduckgo duckduckgo.com/and startpage - www.startpage.com/Beyond that, I'm lost myself on what to do, but I find this entire subject extremely concerning.
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Post by celawson on Aug 23, 2017 11:00:48 GMT -5
Why can't ESPN learn that as their own purposeful intrusion of politics into sportscasting rises, their ratings fall? Hey, ESPN, it's an INVERSE relationship!
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Post by celawson on Aug 22, 2017 13:00:05 GMT -5
Cassandra, you and I are in complete agreement regarding your last post. (And a couple others) It's definitely not simply access to birth control that will help, but good education on how to use it properly.
(Along with plenty of admonitions to "not have sex!" And all the reasons why, heh.) 😃
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Post by celawson on Aug 22, 2017 12:16:39 GMT -5
I've got to run to work, but some quick thoughts on abortion in general -- I don't think the statistics on abortion bear out this opinion that women/girls take the possible consequence of unintended pregnancy seriously enough. Or even the sex act itself seriously enough. Of course abortion is not "ho-hum". But more people need to think about this BEFORE they get pregnant. And fewer do in a society that tells them abortion is a right for any reason, and the fetus is just a clump of tissue, and that freedom of sexual expression is a good thing to pursue without shame but-as-a-side-note-use-protection. It's not easy to use protection well. Taking a pill everyday is hard. Mistakes are made. Condoms break. People need to understand this, too. If women with 1 or 2 prior abortions accounted for 36.2 percent of abortions in 2013 - in which total abortions amounted to a bit under 1 million - that's a LOT of people who got into the same predicament they did previously - well over 300,000. Women with 3 or more accounted for 8.8% - that's roughly 80,000 women who have had SEVERAL abortions. So the percentage of women who had multiple abortions in 2013 was nearing HALF (over 44%) of total abortions? That's amazing to me. In addition, with the majority being ages 18-19 (over 67%), it seems clear to me that these young people are not thinking hard enough about the consequences of having sex, and are clearly not ready to raise a child. Then don't have sex. Or be VERY VERY careful if you do. I had a friend in college who used a condom AND the pill together. How many people are that careful? I waited myself until I was practically engaged and had had conversations with my now husband that we'd raise a child if that happened to us. Anyway, what does sexual intercourse add to the average 18-19 year old's life beyond the risk of pregnancy and STDs? Not enough to justify the risks, IMO. Yet how many of us as parents have these sorts of conversations with our kids? Yes, of course, have access to birth control. Increase access of it to the poor. But at the same time, we need to have different, ongoing conversations with our young people, as a society and as families. www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/ss/ss6512a1.htm
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Post by celawson on Aug 21, 2017 16:33:02 GMT -5
I think we're talking about two different things, Cassandra. You think I want to legislate against all abortions and force women or girls to carry all babies to term. But I'm not. I don't think that's realistic, and I'm honestly trying to be pragmatic. What I'm against is a society that promotes abortion for any and every reason, which the Roe v Wade decision does, and a society that promotes sexual freedom in all of its expressions, with personal pleasure at the forefront of decision making here rather than morality or consequences. And of course, in this particular discussion, a society (Iceland) that promotes abortion by pressuring pregnant women to 1) have the testing done, and 2) act on a positive result with an abortion. www.cbsnews.com/news/down-syndrome-iceland/What I'm after is a society that places more value on every human life, disabled or not, and that places more value on the sex act so that it is taken with the seriousness and personal responsibility it should be. And a society that is clear in not only its respect for the most vulnerable among us (and that includes the unborn, the elderly, the ill, the disabled, the disenfranchised), but also the RESPONSIBILITY we have to care for the most vulnerable among us. This goes deeper than mere legislation to outlaw abortion (which will only force them to back alleys, anyway). The change must be at the root of the problem - how we view each other, how we view what an unborn child is at any stage of pregnancy, how we view the disabled, how we view our own responsibility in all of this. Damn, I have to run out for a bit. Will be back. One last thing -- I think, for your hypothetical to work better for me, you'd have to add in something about the unwilling relative being the CAUSE of the other person's predicament in the first place, by a choice they freely made knowing their relative could become sick from their decision. If they understood they were responsible to some degree, then I think we'd be in a different place with regards to more people voluntarily doing it rather than the need to force anyone.
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Post by celawson on Aug 21, 2017 14:55:25 GMT -5
i will clarify my perspective on this. In an ideal world, there would be no abortion. In a closer to ideal world, there would be way fewer than there are now, and society would look at abortion like the tragedy, and at times, evil, that it is. And in a closer to ideal world, society WOULD support the families and babies and disabled older people and pregnant women etc. It already does, to a degree, by private charities, people's own extended families, government assistance, churches. Obviously there is a ways to go. And if people paired sexual intercourse with love and marital commitment, like Catholic dogma teaches, I dare say there would be fewer unwanted pregnancies in the world and consequently fewer abortions.
My point about the Down Syndrome issue specifically, is that people are looking at this high frequency of abortion of Down Syndrome fetuses as a good, in order to eradicate the PEOPLE who have Down Syndrome, when the actual good would be to eradicate the disease as Lejeune points out. I think we can all see where society is heading when unborn life is viewed so callously - it does extend into other part of society in insidious ways.
EDITED TO ADD: I will have to come back to answer about the emotional toll. Sorry.
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Post by celawson on Aug 21, 2017 13:40:53 GMT -5
As expected - the attack on this man who walked the walk, because he's religious. So someone is discredited on his views of patients he dedicated his life to helping, because he was a devout Catholic? Catholics are extreme, eh? Because they have a consistent approach to the sanctity of life? (I'm not going to comment on credit for research that I know nothing about. It's irrelevant to the thread topic, anyway.) And the 'agency of women's bodies' argument falls apart in the face of another body involved that is not the woman's, sorry but that's my view. There are two human lives there and two distinct bodies.
Your opinion that it is better to kill a child in the womb who MAY have Down Syndrome, puts completely healthy children at risk. Beyond that, it's entirely speculation that the child with Down Syndrome WILL suffer. Beyond that, WHO DOESN'T SUFFER in life? News flash - No one. And who decides what amount or type of suffering is acceptable? I guess you already have by the way you callously have judged that couple who chose to have their child who eventually died. My career is dedicated to working with the disabled - it's the definition of my medical specialty - and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that only the people living in the suffering can tell you if it's worth it or not. Once society enters that territory, and unfortunately it's clear we already have, it's downhill from there. IF you're so concerned with suffering, would you change your view on abortion if it is proven beyond a doubt that the fetus feels pain when its body is being torn apart?
So you, Opty, are advocating killing babies who are not yet born due to the chance they may be born "defective" and have the probability of some degree of suffering.
And Cassandra's argument is that it's a consequence of choice and that we kill perfect fetuses all the time, but so be it because, well, choice.
And Dr. Lejeune advocated for compassion and respect and care and love, rather than abortion, for those with Down Syndrome, along with dedicating his life to find a cure for his patients.
I will go with Dr. Lejeune, thank you.
Of course every abortion is, in my mind, a tragedy. But it's even more tragic when society as a whole advocates for abortion. It's clear in Iceland and Europe and even here in the U.S., that there is some pressure for abortions to be performed if the test is positive. And that changes the entire perspective on the worth of human life and of disabled people. And of course it introduces a slippery slope.
Call Catholics what you will (and I'm a practicing Catholic), but at least the dogma on the sanctity of life is consistent.
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Post by celawson on Aug 21, 2017 12:11:14 GMT -5
Of COURSE this is a form of eugenics. Anyone saying otherwise is very good at deluding themselves. I'm just going to post a video interview here of the great man, doctor, and scientist Jerome Lejeune who discovered the genetic cause of Down Syndrome and developed the method of prenatal testing for it and other genetic disorders. He's been called the father of modern genetics. He spent his life trying to find a cure and advocate for those afflicted with it. It was incredibly painful to him to know people could and did use the genetic work which he developed, to identify and abort those with Down Syndrome. The first 3 minutes of the video are the most important, and it is there he speaks of the cost to society of Down Syndrome, and the cost to society of aborting those with Down. I've transcribed some, but it's far better to watch the man who is at the center of this issue discuss it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_QjrZY4WP4
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Post by celawson on Aug 18, 2017 12:42:20 GMT -5
The Vice News clip NT posted was fascinating. The Nazis in it are repugnant, of course. But one thing that was very interesting is that even a professionally edited clip such as that did not show any of the white supremacists inciting violence, throwing the first punch, macing anyone. It showed THEM getting maced by the resistance, though. And that brings me to wonder - how do we deal with these guys?
Vince above said: No, only the guy with the car and anger management issues actually killed anyone. But their callous response to Heather Heyer's death was pretty awful. I don't think death of the "other" will bother a lot of these monsters, and it seems a small step to go from ridiculing someone who was killed, to participating in an action that would cause the killing itself.
Back to my question - how do we deal with these people? Large tech companies like Google and Paypal have decided to kick them off. Is that a good thing? Is it beneficial to force them underground where their plans and discussions are more hidden? And is there a slippery slope here? Where tech companies can censor speech they find morally repugnant?
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Post by celawson on Aug 16, 2017 12:00:59 GMT -5
Trump failed again to lead in a moral way. I keep hoping he will evolve. He doesn't evolve. He should have unequivocally from minute one denigrated the white supremacists for the evil they are. And if his inability to do that quickly and sincerely has led to more of these white supremacist rallies being scheduled or even emboldened, then Trump needs to take responsibility for that.
This Alex Fields seems to be not only racist Nazi scum, but there are 911 calls that he beat up his mom for telling him to stop playing video games, threatened her with a 12 inch knife, was on medication for anger management. I have no idea if he went to the rally with the intent to hurt anyone, but if someone can beat up his own mom, it's not surprising a rock thrown at his car (as is alleged to have happened) could instigate him to accelerate his vehicle into a crowd of those he believes disagree with him. He's a ticking bomb and a monster. I guess one could argue that anyone who identifies with Nazis is mentally ill, or a psychopath, or "off". I wouldn't refute that. They certainly are evil. But this guy seems particularly unstable in addition to that. And unfortunately, his accelerator was underneath his foot when he got (even more) ticked off.
I'm glad the GOP leadership and AG Jeff Sessions have been strong in condemning these acts, and I hope Fields is prosecuted for both murder and domestic terrorism, but Trump...I have no words.
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